Tallulah!: The Life and Times of a Leading Lady

By Joel Lobenthal

Outrageous, outspoken, and uninhibited, Tallulah Bankhead was an actress known as much for her vices -- cocaine, alcohol, hysterical tirades, and scandalous affairs with both men and women -- as she was for her winning performances on stage. In 1917, a fifteen-year-old Bankhead boldly left her established Alabama political family and fled to New York City to sate her relentless need for attention and become a star. Five years later, she crossed the Atlantic, immediately taking her place as a fixture in British society and the most popular actress in London's West End. By the time she returned to America in the 1930s, she was infamous for throwing marathon parties, bedding her favorite costars, and neglecting to keep her escapades a secret from the press. At times, her notoriety distracted her audience from her formidable talent and achievements on stage and dampened the critical re-sponse to her work. As Bankhead herself put it, "they like me to 'Tallulah,' you know -- dance and sing and romp and fluff my hair and play reckless parts." Still, her reputation as a wild, witty, over-the-top leading lady persisted until the end of her life at the age of sixty-six.

From her friendships with such entertainment luminaries as Tennessee Williams, Estelle Winwood, Billie Holiday, Noël Coward, and Marlene Dietrich, to the intimate details of her family relationships and her string of doomed romances, Joel Lobenthal has captured the private essence of the most public star during theater's golden age. Larger-than-life as she was, friends saw through Bankhead's veneer of humor and high times to the heart of a woman who often felt second-best in her father's eyes, who longed for the children she was unableto bear, and who forced herself into the spotlight to hide her deep-seated insecurities.

Drawn from scores of exclusive interviews, as well as previously untapped information from Scotland Yard and the FBI, this is the essential biography of Tallulah Bankhead. Having spent twenty-five years researching Bankhead's life, Joel Lobenthal tells her unadulterated story, as told to him by her closest friends, enemies, lovers, and employees. Several have broken decadelong silences; many have given Lobenthal their final interviews. The result is the story of a woman more complex, more shocking, and yet more nuanced than her notorious legend suggests.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061865978

Book preview

Part I

1902–1930

Lace Curtains

When I was twelve years old I used to think it was the best sport in the world to give impressions of my step-mother. At that time dad said severely: ‘The place for people to give impersonations is on the stage!’ and so the seed was planted.

The opening years of the twentieth century were a time of intense reaction in the American South, the inauguration of the Jim Crow doctrine of separate but equal. Amid an attempted restoration of the prewar civil order, whites who possessed any degree of power could live as if they were antebellum plantation owners. Statues of Confederate heroes appeared in courthouse squares. There was a new sense of identification with the settlers of the Old South, a nostalgic, recidivist affinity with the lost cause. Integral to this mood was a renewed investment in the prewar vision of the elite white Southern woman and her consecrated purity, passivity, and dependency. Yet bright women chained into the rigid and puritanical society of the upper-class South found ways to express themselves and to make waves. The words that came out of Tallulah Bankhead’s mouth would register shock to new extremes, but her dialogue had been primed by women talking out long before she was born in 1902. All the Bankhead women were outspoken, said Kay Crow, who married Charles Crow, son of Tallulah’s cousin Marion Bankhead. But it was the men who stepped up to public platforms. Tallulah was the first woman in her family to bestow her performances not just on friends and family, but to exhibit herself for pay—to seize a public pulpit.

She was named for her grandmother, Tallulah Brockman Bankhead, whose parents believed they had conceived her during a stopover at Tallulah Falls in northern Georgia. Tallulah Brockman married John Hollis Bankhead in 1866. He had served as captain in the Confederate Army, and to the end of his days he was called Captain John by the family. After the surrender he ran a cotton mill and was warden of a prison in Wetumpka, Alabama. Mrs. Bankhead had given birth to Marie, John Jr., and Louise before Tallulah’s father, William Brockman Bankhead, was born in 1874. In 1887, Captain John was elected to the House of Representatives, beginning a thirty-three-year career in Congress.

Both John and Tallulah Bankhead were formidable, but their styles were different. Mrs. Bankhead was driven around Washington by a liveried chauffeur. Captain John, however, devoutly took the streetcar every day to the Capitol. Grandaddy would say ‘Ain’t,’ Tallulah recalled to author Richard Lamparski in 1966. And my grandmother used to be furious. She’d say, ‘Honey, Captain John, you know better than to say ‘ain’t’!’ He said, ‘Tallulah—first of all, it’s an old Elizabethan word, perfectly legitimate; second, if I didn’t say Ain’t I wouldn’t get a farmer’s vote in the whole state!’

Their son Will Bankhead was moody, high-strung, and nurtured theatrical ambitions that could not be achieved. Will followed his older brother, John, to the University of Alabama, where he was president of the class of 1892 and won a Phi Beta Kappa key, and then followed John to the law school at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

In 1897, he went to New York with two friends to set up a brokerage office, which limped along perilously. My life in New York has been more of a struggle than I have heretofore known, he wrote in his diary in January 1898. But he managed to attend the theater frequently, filling his diary with jottings on what he had seen, and he brewed with the desire to take his love of oratory to the theatrical stage. He happened upon an advertisement in a trade paper announcing openings in a Boston theatrical stock company, and coining a fictitious resume, he was hired. He sent word to his mother and left for Boston.

As a teenager, Mrs. Bankhead herself had enjoyed performing in private theatricals to raise money for the Confederacy, and as a young man, Captain John loved to recite Shakespeare with his neighbors on his farmhouse porch in west Alabama. But a career in the theater was not what they envisioned for Will. Sitting on the Boston Commons, buffeted by the winter chill, he read his mother’s letter demanding that he return. And so I decided this little country boy had better go home, he told Tallulah many years later.

Tallulah’s mother, Adelaide Eugenia Sledge, was Ada to her friends and family, but Gene to her husband. She was just as high strung as Will and just as keen on the stage. The younger of two daughters, Adelaide grew up in Como, a small town in northern Mississippi. She never knew her mother, who succumbed to infection soon after delivering her in 1880; her father subsequently remarried. Her grandfather had amassed a small fortune and he doted on his lovely young granddaughter. As a teenager, she was sent to Paris, returning with trunks full of couture clothes that rustic Como offered few opportunities to display. But Adelaide thought nothing of donning a Paris gown to trundle off down the dirt roads of the town.

Her education was slightly more ambitious than one would have expected of a woman of her time and class. At fifteen, she spent one year at the Salem Female Academy in North Carolina, which had been founded by Moravians in the eighteenth century. She took all the required courses: Latin, math—arithmetic, algebra, and geometry—French history, physical geography, and miscellaneous, which that year meant grammar, composition and dictation, natural history, penmanship.

Her father paid extra every quarter so that Adelaide could also avail herself of vocal lessons and a class in elocution, and Adelaide performed in several school performances. In the early 1940s, a classmate of Adelaide’s came backstage to see Tallulah and told her that she had inherited her talent from her mother, citing as evidence Adelaide’s ability to faint on cue whenever a certain young Moravian doctor appeared in her vicinity. Upon her return home, Adelaide soon had all the local girls in town arranged in tableaux vivants or dancing in the Grecian gambols that were the rage in the 1890s culture out of which sprang Isadora Duncan. In 1950, Tallulah received a letter from a Margaret DuBois Smith of Tuscumbia, Alabama, who recalled her friendship with Adelaide fifty years earlier:

I well remember how she loved to doll up in picture hats and long dress [sic] worn at that date and walk about her bedroom—reciting poetry—and parts of novels saying I am an actress. I was thrilled in watching her. Her acting came so natural—no effort—She certainly missed her calling—then you came along to do what was in her heart.

But a dramatic career was all but impossible for a woman of Adelaide’s class. After becoming engaged to a rich Virginia planter, Adelaide was visiting one of her future bridesmaids in Huntsville, Alabama. She and Will met while she was staying at the McGee Hotel with two girlfriends. It was truly a case of love at first sight, he confided to his diary. He began visiting her on weekends at her aunt’s house in Courtland, Alabama. She broke her engagement to the planter and married Will in Memphis. The marriage came to the great annoyance of her family, Tallulah writes. However, her father presented the newlyweds with a magnificent carriage drawn by two resplendent chestnut mares.

Captain John and Mrs. Bankhead did not attend the wedding, but they seem to have approved of Will’s choice. We send today a gift of love on your bridal occasion, Mrs. Bankhead wrote Adelaide. We extend you a warm enclosure in our family circle. She signed her note Mother and Father. In a letter sent from Washington a day after the nuptials, she asked Adelaide to write me a letter & describe your presents, it will give me great pleasure and tell me all about your wedding….

Will practiced law in Huntsville and was elected in 1900 to the Alabama state legislature. Adelaide and Will’s first daughter, Evelyn Eugenia, was born in January 1901, and Tallulah Brockman exactly one year later. Shortly after Tallulah was delivered, Adelaide contracted peritonitis, an infection of the lower abdominal cavity, exactly as her own mother had done shortly after giving birth to her. Margaret DuBois Smith wrote that Adelaide had summoned her and her sister: She talked at length to us & looked so pretty—after three weeks of illness…. Age twenty-one, Ada died the following night. After receiving Holy Communion from the family reverend, Ada spoke regretfully about leaving her infant daughter, then seemed to trustfully submit to the will of God.

The family and Tallulah herself liked to feel that she was destined to be someone to be reckoned with since conception. Years later, Tallulah produced for a reporter a letter her mother had written to her father: "From the number of kicks I feel, don’t rule out the prospect of twins. Will’s sister Marie later said that in her dying moments Ada had said to her, Tallulah will never lack for friends."

At this point Adelaide’s extended family seemed to largely disappear from Tallulah’s life, although Eugenia Bankhead later mentioned she had known Adelaide’s sister Clara Mae. Eventually a portion of the Sledge farm—now fallen on hard times—was bequeathed jointly to Eugenia and Tallulah, for whom Will managed it during the 1930s. Throughout her life, Tallulah treasured what information she could discover about her mother, but not much seems to have been available: My knowledge of Mother’s family is sketchy, Tallulah writes. For many years Will was so bereaved that he was hardly able to speak to his daughters about her.

The two girls were sent to live with Will’s sister Marie in Montgomery. Marie was married to Dr. Thomas Owen, who was archivist for the state of Alabama and a trusted lieutenant in the Bankhead reelection machine. They had a son, Thomas, who was eight years older than Tallulah. Marie wrote a social column for the Montgomery Advertiser. Kay Crow described her as a wonderfully outgoing woman who would speak her mind about everything. She could just say things that would stop you in your tracks.

For the next decade Tallulah and Eugenia lived alternately with Marie and with their grandparents in Jasper when Congress was in recess. Will was disconsolate for years after Mother died, Tallulah said in 1944. He stayed in Huntsville, salving his sorrow with liquor until he was summoned to Jasper to join his brother John’s law practice.

Tallulah declared as a child and an adult that she was her grandfather’s favorite of all his grandchildren, and she considered her grandmother a second mother, even addressing her as Mama. But Tallulah believed her father favored Eugenia. Eugenia was frail throughout childhood. When she was three years old, she came down with measles and whooping cough simultaneously, which left her temporarily blinded. She was treated by a Montgomery doctor who proscribed any exposure to sunlight. For months Eugenia was forced to play at night and sleep in the daytime; she was then taken to Washington for further treatment. By the age of six, her vision was substantially restored. But her sight was never very keen; and as an adult, one eye, perhaps as a result of a separate condition altogether, wandered noticeably.

From an early age, Tallulah demonstrated a boisterousness at odds with the codes of gentility. Zora Ellis, a former schoolmate in Jasper, recalled walking to and from elementary school with Tallulah; when Tallulah’s funny bone was tickled, she would fall to the sidewalk laughing raucously. Alternately, Tallulah could pitch tantrums so frightening that her grandmother would douse her with buckets of cold water.

Never make yourself conspicuous, Will counseled her. It’s bad form, bad manners. But on occasions he imparted a quite different and equally compelling message. When she was five Will took her to Birmingham to have her tonsils removed. During the operation the doctor accidentally cut into her uvula, to which one of Tallulah’s doctors later attributed the low timbre of her voice. As a reward for her courage, Will took her to a vaudeville show. A chanteuse sang songs that Tallulah recalled as slightly risqué, recalling the line And when he took his hat I wondered when he’d come again. Tallulah absorbed the songs and performed them later. Daddy was fascinated by my impersonation.

Sometimes he would come home under the influence, wake her up, bring her downstairs in her nightgown, stand her up on the table in the dining room, and ask her to give her impersonation of the songbird. She loved being on top of the world: the dining room was only used for large family dinners. Will’s approval came in great gales of laughter. One night he came home with most of the University of Alabama Glee Club. Again she was summoned and again she performed.

At Sunset, the Bankhead’s late-Victorian wedding-cake house in Jasper, Eugenia and Tallulah poked around their relatives’ old clothes packed away in the attic, making up dramas to suit the costumes they found. Tallulah sought out a more public forum for performance from her earliest years. Among friends and strangers, she specialized in cartwheels, back bends, mimicry, and song-and-dance routines, and relished her roles in school performances. She read enthusiastically and her father’s love for Shakespeare inspired her to commit a number of soliloquies to memory. In a play put on by the fourth-grade class, Tallulah wore a kerchief around her head to impersonate a black mammy. It wasn’t the leading part, but she stole the show, Zora Ellis recalled, and had every intention of stealing the show.

But schoolwork presented problems. I was too tense and restless to concentrate on paper, she recalled in middle age. Tallulah’s outlandish name—said to mean terrible as in mighty in Indian dialect—was a handicap. I used to hate it so as a child, she recalled in 1966. It would break my heart, because you’d meet kids and they’d say ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Mary,’ ‘Louise,’ ‘Virginia?’ And I’d say, ‘Tallulah,’ and they’d go ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ and you know how sensitive children are.

Will and his father continued to hatch business schemes during their government career, yet success largely eluded them. Daddy never made much money, either as lawyer or government servant, Tallulah wrote. He had no instinct for business. Nevertheless they led a privileged existence; Democratic hegemony across the South guaranteed that sitting politicians were an elite. Labor was cheap, and Sunset swarmed with black servants with whom the family maintained close relationships that mirrored the prewar era. Will Bankhead recorded in the diaries he kept in law school and during a short stint practicing in New York a full allegiance to the bigotry of his time and place.

Tallulah’s friend Stephan Cole recalled that while Tallulah had fish pride about being a Southerner, she was ashamed of the way blacks were treated there. I never went through any of that, thank God, she insisted in 1966, revealing the enlightened liberalism of her family with the example of Willie Mae Gollach, daughter of the Bankhead’s cook, who was permitted to sleep on the sleeping porch with Eugenia and Tallulah.

Mrs. Bankhead’s strongest expletive was hussy, a word she considered so inflammatory that it could never be used in front of her grandchildren. She told the girls that religion and politics were taboo subjects in a social setting, but at dinner with just the family Tallulah said, that’s all we talked about! Most of it was incomprehensible to her, but she recalled the mounting anxiety at home as election time approached. Then as now, it was not uncommon for Southern politicians to retain their seats for decades. A Democratic nomination all but assured election; nevertheless, competition for the nomination could be fierce. The Bankhead family never quite got over Captain John’s defeat in 1906 by Richmond Pearson Hobson, the young naval lieutenant who had been lionized for his conduct during the Spanish American War. The following year, however, Bankhead was elected to the Senate.

Recalling her childhood, Eugenia would invariably portray herself as the perpetual victim of her younger sister. Eugenia was very meek, as a girl, and by the time they were preteens, Tallulah weighed exactly double what Eugenia did. I used to lock myself in the bathroom every time Daddy left until he came home from lunch, Eugenia recalled. If I didn’t she’d break into the room and be twisting my arm. Eugenia kept a copy of a Rover Boys adventure story in the dirty clothes hamper and a blanket in the linen chest; as soon as Daddy left I made myself a little bed and read until he came home.

All right, Nothin’ Much, Will would say, I’m home now; you can come out.

David Herbert, a friend of the two Bankhead sisters, recalled being told by Eugenia that as children they were once each given a duckling. Both girls took the pets to bed with them. During the night Tallulah discovered that she had rolled over her duck and killed it. So she put her dead duck in Eugenia’s bed and took Eugenia’s live duck, and put it in her bed. In the morning, Eugenia was given hell for killing the duck.

She’d say, ‘Let’s seesaw,’ Eugenia recalled. I’d say ‘All right.’ ‘Let’s put this plank out of the barn window.’ She was so much heavier that she got about that much plank. And to balance it I got the rest of the plank out the barn window. I was having a wonderful time…sailing through the air, like a man on the flying trapeze. Her feet were just bouncing off the ground a little like that. But once the dinner bell rang, Tallulah bolted into the house, and there I was in the compost heap and Sister was at the dining room table.

Following that incident, Will built a round seesaw for them. Tallulah told Eugenia to push. Somehow it caught up with me, Eugenia recalled, and knocked me on the guinea pig cage, where I proceeded to step on a plank with a rusty nail. In retaliation she picked up a discarded Coke bottle and hit Tallulah over the head with it. Aunt Louise and Daddy rushed out to find us both lying covered with blood and guinea pigs.

At night she would read to Tallulah by the light of a candle stuck into a Coke bottle. "When she was very disagreeable I’d read her The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is one of A. Conan Doyle’s most terrifying things. I’d say ‘Ooooohhh…’ blow the candle light out and grab her…she thought the Hound of the Baskervilles had her by the throat. But the sisters’ mutual dependence was as strong as their conflicts. We really loved each other very, very much in those days," Eugenia recalled in 1971.

It would have been difficult for any child not to retain a terrible guilt about Adelaide’s death, while her father’s subsequent tailspin only served to heighten Tallulah’s feelings of culpability. She also learned from Will during her childhood that he had originally hoped his second child would be a boy. As an adult, Tallulah was partial to the color baby boy blue because she said it was her father’s favorite color; she connected that to his wanting a boy. Indeed, Tallulah’s lifelong usurpation of masculine stances and prerogatives could be interpreted as a subconscious attempt to give Will the son he had wanted.

Eugenia and Tallulah were deprived of Will’s active presence a good deal of the time and his behavior made them afraid that they could lose him, as they had their mother. Eugenia told Lee Israel, author of 1972’s Miss Tallulah Bankhead, that both girls had seen him on occasion weaving round drunkenly, toting a gun and vowing to join their mother. Not surprisingly, Tallulah was an anxious girl. In 1928 she said that the mere thought of policeman, burglars, and ghosts during her childhood had ensured a night of sleepless fear, half suffocated beneath the bed-clothes.

Tallulah’s extraordinarily aggressive demands for attention throughout her life would indicate that she felt she had been overlooked and shortchanged as a girl. In 1964, when Tallulah filmed her final movie, costar Stefanie Powers was astonished at Tallulah’s ability to plunge instantly into a scene requiring sobs, bloodshot eyes, and a red nose, and then instantly recover her composure and her normal appearance. Tallulah did this not once but numerous times, as coverage angles of the scene were filmed. Powers asked Tallulah what her secret was. Tallulah told her that as a girl she had taught herself to cry because it was the only way she could get attention in the house.

Her feelings of familial neglect were undoubtedly all the more pronounced when the family decided that the strictness of a boarding school would be good for the two sisters. In the fall of 1912, they were sent to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York. The Bankheads were variously Methodist and Presbyterian, but Will insisted the girls be raised Episcopalian in deference to the faith that Adelaide had practiced, and so on Sundays in Jasper, they attended services at an Episcopal chapel set up in a loft over a feed store. Mrs. Bankhead did not approve of Catholicism, but Sacred Heart made sense because Will’s sister Louise was living nearby at the time and because there were few other boarding schools that accepted elementary-school-age children.

Sacred Heart was the first of five schools Tallulah would attend in the next five years. We were always about three weeks late at school, she recalled, and left three weeks too soon, ’cause we wouldn’t come up ’till Congress adjourned or Congress convened, and so I always didn’t know where I was. Tallulah had decided that she would not submit to Yankee ridicule about her name. I didn’t realize, being very young, that you were registered in and naturally everything had to be applied and accounted for. Students asked me what my name was, and I’d say, ‘Elizabeth,’ but of course the teachers—‘Madam’ they were called at Sacred—would say, Tallulah Bankhead, and I’d have to say ‘here.’

If you go to New York, please do not fail to see the children, Will wrote his father in Washington. They are awful homesick. That Christmas, Will himself came to New York and took the girls to a Broadway matinee of The Whip, a blood-and-thunder melodrama replete with a simulated horse race and train wreck. The girls were stirred to such a frenzy that they wet their panties. A couple of months later, Louise took them to see David Belasco’s production of A Good Little Devil, starring Mary Pickford, with Lillian Gish in a supporting role. It was much quieter: a fairy tale transferred from the Paris stage concerning a blind girl whose sight is restored by fairies. It was then, Tallulah later recalled, that she made up her mind: she would be an actress.

At Sacred Heart, Tallulah acquired a facility in French, but her frequent transgressions of school regulations stood in marked contrast to Eugenia’s impeccable behavior. At the end-of-term commencement, the girls wore white veils and carried white lilies. Tallulah’s behavior, however, merited a short black veil and she was forbidden a flower. At the sight of Louise and Will, Tallulah burst into tears.

In the fall of 1913, Eugenia and Tallulah moved on to the Mary Baldwin Seminary in Staunton, Virginia. Tallulah’s cousin Marion, daughter of John Bankhead Jr., was attending and they would be close to their grandparents. However, more disciplinary infractions by Tallulah led to the girls being withdrawn in January 1914. They could not fit in, Marion Bankhead recalled in a letter to Lee Israel, and disrupted the other students by eating together in their beds late at night. Tallulah resented the fact her acting ambitions were unnoticed and she was turned down for the school play. In January, they transferred to the Convent of the Visitation in Washington, where Eugenia continued to outshine Tallulah. There’s no denying that I was the ugly duckling, thanks to my fat and my pimples, she writes in her autobiography. Eugenia was an excellent student, I was an indifferent one. Sister was the party girl. I was the home-body. She liked to be up at the crack of dawn. I liked to lie in bed and meditate on the future.

In January 1915, Will married Florence McGuire, a Jasper native who had worked as his secretary. She was then twenty-five, fourteen years his junior. Florence McGuire was a woman of charm and honesty, Tallulah notes in Tallulah. But naturally she was resented by both Eugenia and Tallulah. In a 1922 interview Tallulah alluded to tensions: When I was twelve years old I used to think it was the best sport in the world to give impressions of my step-mother. At that time dad said severely: ‘The place for people to give impersonations is on the stage!’ and so the seed was planted. Yet Florence did her best to forge a relationship with the girls.

Eugenia’s illness had delayed her entry into school, and therefore she and Tallulah had always been in the same class. In the fall of 1915 the family decided that the girls should be separated for the first time. Eugenia was enrolled into Miss Margaret Booth’s school in Montgomery, while Tallulah was sent to the Holy Cross Academy in Maryland. Alone for the first time, she wept continuously for a month and refused to eat. Aunt Marie gets a frantic phone call from my grandmother, Eugenia recalled, ‘Get Eugenia up here, Tallulah’s starving to death.’ Eugenia was sent north: Sister greeted me with joy. I think she probably ate half a hog that day.

That fall the Bankheads suffered a tragedy when Louise’s son William Perry, a college student, died of walking typhoid. On November 15, Tallulah wrote her grandmother:

I received your lovely letter telling me all about the funeral and I also received a dear letter from Aunt Louise. It must have been beautiful with those lovely flowers but oh how sad. A boy so bright, so young and handsome to be snaped [sic] away in all his youth and glory. It must have been an awful shock to Ola [his fiancée] but dear Aunt Louise her sorrow is greater than any. In the middle of the night I find my self crying to think I will never see dear Billy again and oh I loved him better than I could have loved a brother. But we will all see him again in heaven but that seems so far off. Poor Aunt Louise she has had her troubles not in showers but in storms with just a little sunshine now and then but I am afraid the sun will never shine brightly as it did.

A year later, the girls moved to the Fairmont Seminary in Washington, which allowed them to move back in with their family. Tallulah lived with her grandparents, Eugenia with Will and Florence, in two apartments at 1868 Columbia Road in Columbia Heights, a fashionable district popular with politicians and diplomats. Tallulah began piano and violin lessons and played in the Fairmont commencement ceremony. For a time she even entertained the idea of becoming a concert musician.

Adolescence brought a remarkable transformation: Tallulah’s looks began to outshine Eugenia’s. Her skin recovered from a siege of acne. Her hair brightened into a vibrant ash blond that complemented the bright blue, almost sapphire-colored eyes she had inherited from her father. Her stepmother encouraged her to diet, and she slimmed down considerably.

In 1914, Will had made his first bid for the House of Representatives. He was defeated in part because of allegations made about his drinking. But although Will never became a teetotaler, his extended binge following Adelaide’s death was now finally over. In 1916, gerrymandering by the Bankheads led to the creation of a new congressional district from which Will now ran for representative. The same Hobson who had defeated Captain John had now shifted districts to run a campaign that announced itself as a crusade against the Bankhead machine. But this time the Bankheads prevailed, and Will began what would become twenty-four years in the House of Representatives.

Tallulah had made her theatrical ambitions known to the family. Submerged in movie magazines, Baudelaire, and Madame Bovary, she paid no heed when Mrs. Bankhead began plotting an ambitious marriage. Grandmother was very old-fashioned, Tallulah recalled in 1938. She wasn’t against the theatre, but she never could see why a woman should want to work if she didn’t have to.

The teenage Prince of Wales was making a state visit to Washington. Mrs. Bankhead insisted that Tallulah join her and the family to greet him at a reception. Since nothing in the world was good enough for her Tallulah she felt fate had brought her my Prince Charming. Tallulah herself was furious because it meant missing an episode of the serial The Exploits of Elaine, but her grandmother was no one to monkey with, once she’d made up her mind.

Washington’s bon ton lined up to pay homage to the teenage heir apparent, but were perplexed about the correct way to genuflect. Mrs. Bankhead elected to bestow upon the prince a curtsy that brought her nose to the rug, Tallulah recalled. She seemed to be submitting her head to the ax. Her overlong salute blocked traffic for three minutes. Florence Bankhead was daunted by her mother-in-law’s performance. Billy, I am not going to curtsy to that little boy, she told Will. I’d just feel a fool and what’s more, I’d look a fool.

In its June 1917 issue, Picture Play magazine announced that it was launching a beauty contest that would award the winners a role in a film produced by Frank Powell, who was credited with discovering Theda Bara and Blanche Sweet, who were both at the peak of their fame. With her stepmother’s encouragement, Tallulah sent in a photo. The results were announced in the September issue. Tallulah’s photograph was reproduced along with eleven other winners. But Tallulah had neglected to write her name on the photo she submitted, and her application and envelope had been lost. She sent in a duplicate photo to prove her identity.

In 1919, Photoplay interviewed Mrs. Bankhead, who recounted Will’s ambition to go on the stage. However, I stopped him before he got very far. He was studying law and I wanted that to be his profession. But the ambition of her father that I nipped in the bud broke out in Tallulah, who has always been perfectly determined to be an actress. She had promised to wait until she was older…but things happened that just took matters right out of our hands.

The family thought that if I had no talent the best cure would be to let me on the stage, Tallulah explained in a 1921 interview, and if I really had talent, why the stage was the place for me. It seems, too, that any qualms Will might have had would only have subjected him to accusations of hypocrisy from Tallulah. He had continued to encourage her interest in the theater, taking her since she’d starting attending schools in the D.C. area to performances by the resident stock company at Polit’s Theatre as well as at Keith’s vaudeville house. Furthermore, in 1915, Lois Wilson, an Alabama native, had won at age nineteen a beauty contest that launched her on a career in silent films. Will had been one of the contest judges. Tallulah also remembered the contest and later referred to Wilson as my father’s godchild.

Captain John’s was the deciding vote. He never objected to my acting, Tallulah explained years later. To him it was just another public career; it was carrying on the Bankhead name.

He was the finest judge of character I ever knew, Marie recalled in 1931, "and he had every confidence that Tallulah had a force in her from her very childhood. He, too, was given to theatrical gestures. When the more conservative members of the family hesitated about giving approval to her ‘going on the stage,’ Marie recounted with an equal flair for effect, the old man, with flashing eyes, and emphatic gesture declared: ‘Stand back, all of you. This is my job. Tallulah shall have her chance!’"

At fifteen, Tallulah put formal schooling behind her and left for New York.

Debutante

I am going to make good with a bang! Wait and see. Then you will be proud of your bad little girl with her bad little temper.

A chaperone for Tallulah was mandatory, and it had been decided that Aunt Louise would accompany her to New York. Louise was now separated from her second husband, Arthur Lund, with whom she had lived in New York, but Lund was still living there and they remained in close contact. Louise’s surviving child, a girl, was now married. Louise was racked with guilt over her insistence that her late son had been too young to marry his sweetheart, Ola Davis. And so she brought Ola to New York as well, hoping to launch her on a singing career. The three moved into an apartment at 341 West Forty-fifth Street, adjacent to the midtown theater district. Louise was preoccupied, too, with the possibility of communicating with her dead son and she insisted that Tallulah and Ola regularly accompany her to spiritualist meetings.

The promised movie contract in a Frank Powell production turned out not to be a Frank Powell production at all because Powell had gone bankrupt. Instead Tallulah was going to appear in a Mutual Film Corporation production directed by Dell Henderson entitled Who Loved Him Best? Miraculously, the film survives at the Library of Congress in excellent con

dition. Watching it today, one would never know that this was Tallulah’s professional acting debut. She looks as if she had been acting all her life.

The film stars Edna Goodrich, at the time one of Mutual’s leading actresses. She plays movie star Dora Dane (a flashback shows her discovery in a garment factory). Dora rejects a producer’s marriage proposal because she is in love with a young sculptor, George Steele. Steele is convinced that he’s burned out and fritters away his time with bohemian amusements. Dora campaigns to get George back to the grindstone while contending with a rich widow who enjoys patronizing young artists and who seems to have designs on George.

Tallulah plays Nell, one of George’s bohemian friends. Her role is peripheral to the plot, but she is front and center screen in several scenes. She is first seen at an art gallery opening, enthusing with friends over the works on display. Next she gets a sequence all to herself, running up the stairs to George’s studio ahead of her friends. She pauses at his door, satisfies herself that he’s home, and then bursts in to congratulate him. Rather than bursting in, one could just as easily say bouncing in: throughout the film Tallulah evinces many stylistic hallmarks of the adorably impulsive World War I ingenue. Commanding the screen alone outside George’s studio, she magnetizes the viewer and rewards the camera’s scrutiny.

Once inside George’s studio, Nell finds that he is talking with Dora, who is irate when Nell’s friends troop in boisterously. You pretend to be his friend but you want to ruin him, Dora insists, and shows the lot of them the door. Dora is determined that George buckle down to work on an entry for a sculpture competition on the theme American Militant.

In a later scene at the Greenwich Village Bazaar, Tallulah as Nell wears a harlequin costume, blows on a tin horn, kicks up her heels, and perhaps overdoes her madcap vivacity just a bit. By contrast, in the climactic scene she skillfully subdues herself: Dora, furious at finding George and the widow kissing at the Bazaar, has smashed his competition statue before the startled gaze of Nell and her friends. Then Dora reveals that it is really an identical statue created by George’s best friend, who has been secretly copying his work. Nell and her gang listen in astonishment to Dora’s confession, then file out buzzing about what has just happened. George and Dora are left alone in an embrace at the final fade-out.

Who Loved Him Best? didn’t receive much attention when it was released in February 1918, just after Tallulah’s sixteenth birthday. It was one half of a double bill at the New York Theatre on Forty-fifth Street and Broadway. That just tells about what sort of film this is, Variety snickered. A fascinating artifact today, it was then only one in an avalanche of five-and six-reel feature films flooding the market. Tallulah’s family realized as much and were willing to stake her for the longer haul. Will wrote, My dearest Tallulah: You are certainly going at this thing like you meant business and I am betting on you and backing you to my limit…. But the primary backing still came from Captain John.

Tallulah had been paid twenty dollars a day for her work on Who Loved Him Best? However, she tore up her first paycheck because I thought it a terrible thing to be paid for doing something that I had enjoyed. Louise picked up the pieces and tried to tape the check back together. Financial security was not a Bankhead characteristic, Louise’s sister Marie would say in 1932.

Tallulah claimed that Louise was more interested in furthering Ola’s career than her own. But Ola herself was much less ambitious and soon returned to Alabama. Looking for a smaller apartment, Louise steered her niece to the Algonquin Hotel on Forty-fifth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Tallulah later claimed that Louise had no idea that the Algonquin was the city’s leading theatrical watering hole, but Tallulah suddenly found herself at the hub of Broadway and the film industry. A constellation of New York’s sharpest and cruelest wits—known as the Algonquin Round Table—held court in the dining room at lunch. At after-theater supper, the lobby and dining room were filled with performers eating after their shows. Many stars also lived there or kept apartments there to rest in on matinee days. Tallulah was afraid that starchy Louise would immediately relocate when she realized what she had stepped into; however, Louise enjoyed the floor show as much as I did, Tallulah recalled of that passing parade of celebrities.

A letter from Mrs. Bankhead to Tallulah survives that must have been written soon after Tallulah and Louise settled at the Algonquin. It is an extraordinary jumble of anxious injunction, pedestrian news, religious fervor, and homiletic counsel: Precious heart, she advised Tallulah, be unselfish and do as many little acts of kindness as possible, and it will in return bring joy to you. Eugenia, who was preparing for her coming out, was about to take dance lessons every Friday night. But Washington was snowbound, and as a result Mrs. Bankhead was going out very little. New York, she could have assumed, would only be more frigid. Keep your feet well protected, for fear of dread pneumonia. My beautiful sister at 23 died in 3 days…. She implored Tallulah to dedicate your spirit to God, our heavenly father. She felt sure that her dead grandson William Perry, Louise’s son, was in his Heavenly home where no harm can come to him.

The Bankheads did their best to rally support for Tallulah by writing letters to a network of business contacts in New York. Tallulah put her political training to work to ingratiate herself with the celebrities populating the hotel: she ogled, and all but stalked, her favorite stars. Ann Andrews had been born into West Coast society and was enjoying a success on the Broadway stage. I instinctively liked her the minute I met her, Andrews recalled in 1982, and she was so intelligent and so amusing that we became great friends. Andrews was impressed by Tallulah’s thirst for knowledge, a drive completely independent of her failures at school. Everyone has an aura, Andrews related, "and Tallulah had an aura of the mind—extraordinary. Tallulah’s conversation, her grasp of current events, was impressive. She always knew everything that was going on, Andrews recalled. Straitened by her small allowance, Tallulah went to local newsstands and asked, May I borrow this? Publication by publication, she worked her way through that week’s crop. Tallulah was at that time without a doubt the healthiest human being I have ever known, Andrews recalled. Her vitality was just unheard of. When she started in New York it seemed her feet could hardly stay on the ground."

After weeks of pursuing leads, Tallulah finally found work. She was summoned by the Schubert office to play a silent role, a walk-on, in The Squab Farm, a new play by husband and wife Fanny and Frederic Hatton, a popular playwriting team. The Hattons’ Lombardi Ltd., a farce set in the fashion world, was currently enjoying a long run. The Squab Farm sent up the foibles of the movie industry. Lowell Sherman played an unscrupulous director, and Alma Tell was a star who shocked her studio by refusing to put on a revealing costume for the camera. Tallulah was Gladys Sinclair, one of a flock of young starlets, toothsome young chicks at the squab farm.

She was lonely and disoriented during the tryouts in Connecticut and New Jersey. Ignorant of one of the theater’s oldest superstitions, she whistled in the communal dressing room and was rebuked severely by her roommates. Julia Bruns, who played the role of a temperamental film diva, took pity on Tallulah and invited her to share her dressing room, which further alienated Tallulah’s colleagues.

On March 13, The Squab Farm opened in New York at the Bijou Theatre on Forty-fifth Street, next door to the Morosco, where Lombardi Ltd. was ensconced. Three days later, Tallulah had nothing but glad tidings to report to her grandmother: Your little namesake is now a full fledge [sic] actress. I have made my debut on Broadway and am so crazy about the stage. I have just returned from the matinee and I can’t wait to go back for the evening performance.

A portrait of Tallulah was published in the March 17 edition of the Sunday Morning Telegraph, headlined SOCIETY GIRL GOES ON STAGE. As thrilled as Tallulah was, the publicity did as much harm as good, for there is probably nothing more handicapping for an actress than to look like a society dilettante. Furthermore, the piece described her as the star of The Squab Farm, which did not go over at all well with Alma Tell.

Theatre magazine reported that in The Squab Farm, the selfishness, vanity and rapacity of the idols of the screen were laid bare with unflinching realism and rare comic verve. But the play closed after four weeks. Photoplay stated that it was precisely that irreverence that doomed the comedy. The fans didn’t like to see their screen idols burlesqued, even by the privileged Hattons.

Tallulah believed that the curtain had also rung down on her theatrical ambitions. However, Russian director Ivan Abramson had seen the play and offered her a part in his picture When Men Betray. In it she played a woman raped by her sister’s fiancé. It was released in June. Motion Picture News reported that as the foolish girl rudely awakened, she had acted with sincerity and feeling. Tallulah was ecstatic at a mention by Harriet Underhill of the Tribune. Miss Tallulah Bankhead is new to the screen and she proves the truth of the theory that brains are better than experience.

Tallulah’s career in silent films had been launched. Scouting for a leading woman for his new star, Tom Moore, Samuel Goldwyn found Tallulah and hired her for Thirty a Week, in which she played a wealthy girl in love with her family’s new chauffeur. Released in October 1918, Thirty a Week was quickly dismissed, but Tallulah and Moore were commended by Moving Picture World for their excellent acting.

During the final months of World War I, Louise decided to join the Red Cross in Europe as a nurse’s aide. Marie was sent up to New York to oversee Tallulah, and accompanied her on a round of interviews with film executives in December. The family insisted Tallulah return with Marie to Washington for Christmas. In Washington, Bobby Carrere—the great beau of Washington, he couldn’t make up his mind about Sister or me—took Tallulah to see James Barrie’s bittersweet fantasy Dear Brutus. Eighteen-year-old Helen Hayes had a prominent role. Tallulah had first seen Hayes act with a stock company in Washington; she was envious that Hayes had been onstage since age six.

The Bankheads allowed Tallulah to return to New York unsupervised only after Will came and conferred with Frank Case, owner of the Algonquin. She was given an allowance of fifty dollars per week, of which twenty-one dollars went toward her room at the hotel. Will told Case that if Tallulah was not in by midnight she was not to be allowed in until morning. One night, there was a ring at my bell, Ann Andrews recalled with a chuckle. And there was Tallulah. She’d been locked out. Could she spend the night with me?

It was at the Algonquin that Tallulah first met British actress Estelle Winwood, who remained one of her closest friends until the day she died. Winwood had emigrated to New York in 1916 to appear in a play called Hush and had immediately established herself as a Broadway favorite. One night over supper at the Algonquin she went over to say hello to Ethel Barrymore. And there was this Tallulah, Winwood recalled in 1982. And I looked at her in astonishment. I’d never seen anybody so pretty. I said, ‘Oh, my God—who are you?’ Tallulah informed her that she’d seen her latest play sixteen times.

Several nights later, Winwood was attending a party in an Algonquin suite. She was the last guest to leave, when the host got me by the wrist and pulled me back and said, ‘Oh, no, you don’t, Estelle.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Oh, no, you’ve been kidding me, and flirting with me the whole evening, you’re not going.’ I said, ‘How dare you.’ You know, very British…as though I was the most important person in the world. Well we had a fight and I kicked and screamed and he carried me to his bedroom and he got me on that bed and he had an affair with me.

It was three o’clock in the morning, and she was afraid of a pregnancy, and asked herself whom she knew in the hotel who could help. She remembered the name Bankhead and knocked on Tallulah’s door. Tallulah was awake and invited her in. I don’t know whether you’ll like me to come in, when I tell you what I’ve come for. Winwood asked if she had a douche bag; Tallulah didn’t know what she meant. In that case, Winwood said, did Tallulah have an enema bag? As it turned out she did. Winwood explained what had just happened and Tallulah showed her to the bathroom. I had a good washout and then I said ‘Goodnight’ and that was the beginning of a great friendship.

I molded her in a way to get into being Tallulah Bankhead, Winwood claimed, which she never would have been if it hadn’t been for me. Perhaps Winwood exaggerated her influence—but there’s no question that her impact on Tallulah was genuine. Tallulah was eighteen years younger, and she used to take notice of what I said. I terribly often bullied her, told her she was a fool. And she didn’t mind at all. Thought she was, I think. And so she always would do something that I would advise her.

Jobyna Howland was another older actress who assumed something of a motherly role toward Tallulah. Howland usually played character roles in comedy and went on to give some priceless renditions of comic battle-axes in films in the early 1930s. Six feet tall, Howland possessed a wind-in-the-chimney voice from which issued commands that the most stalwart might find hard to resist.

Over the holidays in Washington, Tallulah had insisted that the family buy her a low-cut evening gown in which to shine at parties, but attending the theater with Bobby Carrere, Tallulah lost her nerve and wouldn’t remove her wrap all evening. So did her behavior during these early days at the Algonquin swing between extremes. She behaved so madly stupidly, Winwood complained. Like for instance, you’re sitting here on this sofa, and there might be three other people over there, and she’d come in and flounce around. What for? Nobody cared about her then. She wasn’t Tallulah Bankhead. She was just a girl. Tallulah craved attention, and her posturing and posing made sure she was noticed. Yet part of her wanted to be looked at so that she could hide, disappear, as it were, behind the facade her flamboyant behavior constructed. She insisted on reaping a particular type of boggled attention that could deflect a natural shyness many people would notice over the course of her life.

Her poses and her pranks earned her the affectionate condescension of the Algonquin Round Table. I was in a way sometimes kind of their pet, Tallulah recalled in 1966, ’cause I was such an idiot. I put on this big act; I was so nervous all the time they thought I was putting on airs, and it was sheer nerves.

She experimented with her look, patterning her appearance after whoever was her idol of the moment. Tallulah had decided that Mary Pickford’s ringlets could look well on her and submitted her thick wavy hair to be coiled into Pickford’s sausage curls. Permanent waving was in its infancy and the result was rather crude. Casting managers said that she didn’t look right, Dorothy Dickson recalled in 1982. Dickson and Carl Hyson were a very popular husband-and-wife ballroom dance team, who performed in their own Palais Royale nightclub and on Broadway. They lived at the Algonquin. I took her to Ziegfeld—Dickson danced in the Follies of 1917 and 1918—but Ziggy wouldn’t have anything to do with her. He just wasn’t interested at all.

Early in 1919 Tallulah spent two weeks with a stock company in West Somerville, Massachusetts, which played twelve performances of a different play each week. On February 9 she wrote Captain John from the Hotel Woodbridge, describing her plunge into a grueling work schedule. She had already opened in a new role the previous Monday afternoon, with only nine hours of rehearsal. She was rehearsing the role of a French girl for the following week’s offering while performing the first play at night. Rehearsals were nine to twelve noon, followed by a lunch break, a matinee, dinner, and then an evening performance. I am nearly dead now…. she wrote. She had been asked to stay on for the balance of the season but protested that the work would kill me. She said, too, that the management wanted her to replace the current leading lady, who had befriended her.

West Somerville was clearly too far from the Great White Way for Tallulah’s comfort. Yet Somerville was a very large place as far as people go but no conveniences at all. I have a room in the only hotel here which is the tourist home. No private bath. I climb three flights of stairs. There is nothing here at all but I am working very hard for the experience….

Back in New York, Tallulah won a role in a new film, The Trap, which was released at the end of the summer. The film was one more undistinguished melodrama, this time starring Olive Tell, whose sister Alma had starred in The Squab Farm. In The Trap, Tell plays a schoolteacher who unwisely marries a Yukon gambler. He is a heel who uses her sister, played by Tallulah, as a pawn to wreak havoc on his wife.

While filming The Trap, Tallulah was instructed to have dinner with a family named Cauble every evening when she got back from the studio. Mrs. Cauble was miffed that Tallulah would not accept her suggestions that she spend the night. I felt that she got to the hotel in time to have supper with ‘Jobena’ [Howland] (some actress) and her looks prove to me that she has kept late hours.

Aunt Louise had returned from overseas late in 1918, after a surfeit of relief workers in Italy scuttled her plan to serve with the Red Cross. She would subsequently write her father: I wish to do all the good I can—that I may build my future life as high and happy as possible. Now she determined to make Tallulah the object of her good works, but Tallulah herself had other ideas. James Julian, a friend of the Bankhead family whose office was just down the block from the Algonquin, insisted on monitoring Tallulah’s activities as much as she allowed. On March 19, 1919, he wrote to Tallulah’s grandfather that she seemed to be getting obstreperous again with Louise. A month later, Louise was in Washington, writing to her father in Jasper to share her conviction that Tallulah was going to hell in a handbasket. She copied out a letter from Mrs. Cauble, in which she described Tallulah as more nervous than any other young person she’d ever known. Louise added her own convictions to Mrs. Cauble’s appraisal:

Mrs. Cauble’s letter is only a repetition of the manner in which Tallulah treats all who have undertaken to help her. The history of my efforts,—she tried to discredit by telling all of you it was Ola, my partiality to Ola & etc. which was a great injustice to me and was not true. Florence took her turn and said it was hell and she would never do it again. Sister Marie tried her and tho under most pleasant circumstances she said it was hell too—

Not long after The Trap opened to mediocre reviews, Tallulah wrote Will that Goldwyn had invited her to his office and tried to interest her in more film roles. Will urged her to pursue films: It is a fine thing to contemplate how powerful a factor the screen has become on the thought and conduct of the world, and how great the possibilities it offers to you—my daughter. But Tallulah’s sights were set firmly and exclusively on the stage. I am giving up pictures to go on the legitimate stage as that means so much more to me, she wrote Will. The Trap was the last movie she made for almost a decade.

Live theater remained not only the more prestigious entertainment medium, but the dominant one in New York City, despite the fact that the silent movie industry was also still largely based in the city. The Broadway theater district stretched from Herald Square to Columbus Circle; by comparison with today, the number of theaters operating and plays produced was staggering.

Louise had informed her father that she had not shared Mrs. Cauble’s letter with her mother because she worries so about her granddaughters. As summer approached; Tallulah began to dread every day’s mail delivery. She was convinced that her grandmother would recall her summarily as she had years earlier recalled Will from his theatrical adventure in Boston.

Thanks to Jobyna Howland, however, Tallulah was about to speak her first words on Broadway. Howland was appearing with Estelle Winwood in Rachel Crothers’s A Little Journey at the Little Theatre on Forty-fourth Street. Crothers was one of the most important playwrights on Broadway; her play 39 East was running simultaneously across the street at the Plymouth. Howland told Tallulah that she had recommended her to Crothers, who was casting a touring company of 39 East. Howland warned Tallulah not to put on the vampish makeup she customarily applied, for Tallulah would be reading for the role of a sweet young thing living in a Manhattan boardinghouse.

Although at the time Tallulah’s wardrobe was meager, in those days I felt stark naked unless I had my hat and gloves on. As she began reading, however, her gloves made it difficult to turn the pages of the onionskin paper script. Paralyzed with nerves, she could not get her gloves off. Crothers interrupted her reading, and Tallulah burst into tears, astoundingly at the very moment the part called for them.

This is the story told by Tallulah in her autobiography. To her family she wrote a different story—without any mention of Jobyna Howland—about how she had buttonholed Crothers’s production associate Mary Kirkpatrick, who was an acquaintance of the Bankheads. Perhaps the Bankheads had made it clear to Tallulah that they disapproved of Howland, after Mrs. Cauble’s dubious allusion to her.

However she procured the job, it was a substantial one. Tallulah was hired to act opposite Sidney Blackmer on weekends during the summer, when leads Constance Binney and Henry Hull would be taking long weekends. In the fall she and Blackmer would begin an eight-month tour of the play across the United States. She wrote Captain John: I am going to make good with a bang!!! Wait and see. Then you will be proud of your bad little girl with her bad little temper. But it has come in handy in this play. I have to get so mad! Please come and see me.

Crothers always directed her own plays, and she lavished encouragement and attention on Tallulah during rehearsals. Crothers was not interested in men, Andrews said, and I think she sort of had a crush on Tallulah. Tallulah reported to her family cheering words from the playwright, who told me today that I would be a great actress, that I had a spark that few people had, that she never had to tell me anything because I instinctively knew what to do…. But there was a lot I’ve got to learn about the work that I don’t know and I’m going to work awfully hard.

Blackmer was just out of the army and at the start of his distinguished career on stage and in film. He, too, hailed from the South. Tallulah and he rehearsed their scenes together while taking rides through Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage. On July 25 they made their debuts. A cast change so fleeting would have been unlikely to be reviewed at all extensively; nevertheless, an unidentified review at the Shubert Archive in New York states that Tallulah Bankhead gave to her performance as Penelope Penn the idyllic beauty which it demands. But their run was interrupted after Tallulah’s third weekend onstage, when the cast was directed to strike by the recently formed Actors’ Equity Association. Equity was attempting to limit the largely untrammeled power producers enjoyed over actors. Tallulah plunged into the agitations, handing out programs at benefits that were held regularly to support the unemployed.

Captain John dutifully coughed up a hundred-dollar pledge that Tallulah committed at one of the Equity rallies. But the family did not expect her to become embroiled in public controversy. Why are you an Equity member? a Billboard reporter would ask her two years later. She looked aghast and was reported to reply, Why, I really can’t discuss it…. I know I ought to be ashamed to admit it, but I don’t know enough about the principles and the inside to say anything about Equity. All I do know is that I belong to it and I think it is right and that it is the best thing not only for actors, but for managers too.

While ushering at one rally, Tallulah suddenly felt nauseated and rushed home to the Algonquin. She woke up to

Reviews for Tallulah!

[afinpassing · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Engagingly written and even-handed treatment of a scandal-ridden and misunderstood figure. If anything, a little *too* even-handed in its attempt to avoid a salacious slant... only one passing mention of Patsy Kelly? But it's a great study of the woman's demons and motivations, well-grounded in the cultural, theatrical & cinematic environments in which she rampaged, flourished, entertained and ultimately did herself in.